Mark Weiss wrote:
> OK, I'll weigh in.
>
> I have a very rigid code about these things. That a lot of
> inappropriate behavior happens doesn't excuse it.

Of course it does not "excuse" anything. If Derek Wolcott sexually
harassed or even had a "consensual" affair with a freshman female
student young enough to be his daughter, he was a scumbag and deserved
his trip to the pillory and stocks.

What does it mean to say Yes? A year or two ago a man in my area was
photographed having sexual relations with a female Rottweiler. He was
arrested and hauled in front of a judge who said "How could you do a
thing like this?" The man's reply?--"It was consensual." He went to
jail. What a surprise.

I have had female sexuality waved at me, too: the cloying smile, the
change to seductive vocal tone from a female student while talking to me
only in the hall or in another public space. I have read the
psychoanalyst Michael Eigen's significant mentions of temptation in his
analytic practice. He seems far more candid than most men (or women) in
his position might wish to be; indeed, Eigen seems to have invented the
TMI as a way of communicating. The temptation is real. It is probably
like priestly vows of celibacy in pre-Scandal Catholic seminaries. That
is, does anyone ever really *talk* about this aspect, or is it left to
an easily-deluded conscience to sort it out?

The same temptation is thrown at any clergyman, often at teachers, often
at anyone perceived as being in a position of power or authority. How
could a human bullfrog like Sen.Wilbur Mills gain the favors of Fanny
Foxe, the Tidal Basin Bombshell, unless his power was the largest part
of his anatomy?

However, there is a statute of limitation on all crimes save murder.
When does Wolcott finish his sentence? A shit-sling of the type that
seems to have occurred now comes about 27 years after the incident,
alleged or real. If I recall this even halfway accurately, Wolcott had
to leave Harvard, only to resurface (I believe) across the river at
Boston University, one-time home of another vowed celibate, Robert
Traill Spence Lowell IV.

In grad school 30+ years ago, a young man had a habit of "affairing"
with a girl from his just-concluded class. Not DURING it, after it. He
had a code.

In grad school 30+ years ago, a young woman came onto me in Pathmark
with all the subtlety of a Canal Street doxy in Civil War New York. She
did this in front of my wife. I had no clue. My laughing and sarcastic
wife had to clue me into the dynamic she spotted. Men never have a clue
unless they are natural predators, and I would like to believe I was not
that way back in 1972. But women spot everything.

> When I taught, and when I was a therapist, students and patients
> flirted with me all the time, often outrageously. Of course it turned
> me on, but I didn't respond, because I had a responsibility not to,
> and because they weren't flirting with me so much as with my position
> of authority. This wasn't easy, as the women were often very close to
> me in age, and I might have been interested in other circumstances. I
> did date an adult student of mine in an ungraded non-degree extension
> course, but only after the course was over--we didn't even flirt till
> then.

You were fortunate. I had weekly smoke-by-the-cars discussions in the
parking lot with a 40 year old Israeli doctor's wife in my class. Her
hints of abandonment and discomfort surely were meant to lure me. They
did not. We arranged we would talk at semester's end. She didn't call
and neither did I. Maybe we both got smart.

> Yup, lots of teachers and some therapists succumb to the temptation or
> initiate a flirtation. Therapists risk losing their licenses, and they
> should. Increasingly, teachers risk losing their jobs. That seems fair
> to me, whether it's a man coming on to a female student, or a woman
> etc etc etc. At the very least, the relationship distorts the class as
> a whole. And most of the time it's taking advantage of the student's
> pathology.
>
My older son stands to "inherit" a high school English teaching job from
his years-ago 9th grade English teacher, who finally is retiring. The
man married one of his former students. Rumors were rife about how he
"dated" high school girls. To call this "cheesy" is to insult cows in
Wisconsin.

> But the disparity between student and teacher is different in kind
> than that between doctor and nurse, say, or between an older and a
> younger faculty member. The teacher of young students becomes a
> parental projection, whether he or she likes it. To take advantage of
> this can be extremely destructive. When it goes as far as marriage the
> destructiveness is often more extensive--wife eventually grows up and
> dumps the prick.

See the above. A man in his 40s marries a high school girl. Songs of
Innocence and Experience. The girls look experienced, some may very well
be--yet to grab Dylan's line, "[they] break just like a little girl." If
they break away from you, you're seen the core of innocence triumphant.
For the young lady, at least.

> And then there's the case at hand. Walcott is in fact pretty
> notorious. Some interesting anecdotes have been coming up on WOMPO,
> but there's been noise about him for a long time. And we're talking
> about a forty or fifty year age discrepancy. Plus what would seem to
> be an overwhelming sense of entitlement, coupled with a great deal of
> drinking. Trial by internet is a terrible way to go about things, but
> the poetry chair is a very public appointment. Like it or not, this
> was to be expected.

If Wolcott is what you say, then there's very little to extenuate his
behavior before, during, or since the Radcliffe incident. What continues
to bother me is the apparently endless vengeance of people who are
rerunning stuff that happened 35+ years ago. To prove what?--that
Wolcott is unfit to hold his position? Who might they have preferred in
times past? Berryman, Lowell, Dickey? Again: where is the statute of
limitations to cap Wolcott's offense? Perhaps his statement that he's
avoided commenting on the 1982 incident is inflaming tempers; if he
addressed it honestly and without subterfuge, might it have gone
differently? Quien sabe?

Ken

--
Ken Wolman http://awfulrowing.wordpress.com/ http://www.petsit.com/content317832.html
---------------------------------
"All writers are hunters, and parents are the most available prey."--Francine du Plessix Gray